When The Devil Drives (11 page)

She always felt a little guilty at how obliging Polly was, as they
hadn’t been bosom buddies or anything back in the day. Truth be told, she’d always found Polly a bit dull and literal-minded, so she felt a little hypocritical about coming across so friendly when it was really only a means of securing a favour. Jasmine didn’t feel comfortable using people and she kept telling herself she ought to take Polly out for a few drinks some night by way of gratitude, but thus far that sentiment was in the same pending tray as buying new office furniture, finding an accountant and acquiring a social life.

‘You’re in luck,’ Polly reported. ‘There’s only one Tessa Garrion on record, so no worries about whether I’ve retrieved files on the right person.’

This was always good to know. The experience of spending two days sifting through piles of information in order to find the right Jean Clark was still fresh in Jasmine’s memory.

‘I had to go back a long way, as you warned me. Got her P60 filings starting from October 1980: her payee was the Pan … technician Theatre. Does that sound right?’

Jasmine smiled at Polly’s misreading but considered it impolite to correct her.

‘That’s definitely her. She worked as an actress, but gave that up some time around the mid-eighties. I’m trying to find out what she did next.’

‘Early eighties, by the look of it. Her last wages from this Pantechnithingy Theatre were paid April 1981. After that, looks like she moved briefly into retail footwear. The Glass Shoe Company. She was only with them one month, though.’

‘And where did she go next?’

‘After that, I’ve got nothing. No further filings.’

‘So she moved away. Do you have a record of what district would have her tax records after that?’

‘No, I’m saying she had no tax records after that: not here, not anywhere. She didn’t pay tax after August 1981.’

Jasmine thanked Polly and hung up, realising as soon as she’d done so that she’d forgotten to suggest a drink. Then she accepted that maybe she hadn’t really forgotten.

There’s a grace to receiving, she remembered. She had to remind herself that people weren’t always playing an angle, only giving in order to get. There was a grace to not being a using cow as well, though.

‘You look a bit dischuffed,’ Rab observed. ‘Dead end?’

‘Missing person. Trying to follow her tax trail. Turns out it ends in 1981. Doesn’t sound like the first step towards a happy ending.’

‘Ah, but maybe it was,’ Rab countered. ‘Mr Right comes along and sweeps her off her feet. Lassie never has to work another day.’

‘Her sister did moot that possibility, but if she got married she never invited anybody to the wedding.’

‘Had they fallen out?’

‘More drifted apart.’

‘Aye,’ Rab considered, narrowing his eyes. ‘You’d get a card at least. And if there was no big melodramas you’d have to think she’d let her sister know if she had any weans. Could have been living over the brush with some fancy man, maybe somebody the family wouldn’t have approved of. You said she was an actress? Rich, older admirer. Rich,
married
admirer?’

‘Plausible enough,’ she agreed. ‘But not easy to trace.’

Rab reached down and disconnected his mobile from the hands-free cradle, offering it to Jasmine.

‘Go into contacts and call Annabel Downie,’ he told her.

Jasmine complied and replaced the handset in its cradle as it began to ring. Switched to speaker, the tone pulsed loud inside the car for a few rings, before being answered by a female voice.

‘DC Downie,’ he addressed her. ‘You got five minutes?’

‘Only for you,’ she replied warmly.

‘Can you run a name through STORM for me, and give us a call back?’

‘No bother. Just grabbing a pen here. What’s the name?’

Her eyes on the road, it took Jasmine a moment to realise that the growing pause was awaiting her to fill it.

‘Oh. Tessa Garrion,’ she said.

‘Tessa—’ Rab began to relay.

‘Garrion. I’m on it. Call you right back.’

Rab hung up.

‘Thanks,’ Jasmine said. ‘What’s STORM?’

‘Systems for Tasking and Operational Resource Management. It’s a police database.’

‘So we’ll find her if she’s ever been in bother?’

‘No. We’ll find her if she’s had any dealings with the polis whatsoever. If she ever phoned the emergency services, or even handed in a dropped purse at the local nick, they’ll have her number and address at the time.’

Jasmine’s eyes widened. This might be easy money after all. She could have a result by the time they reached Kingussie.

Rab’s phone rang again shortly.

‘That’s a big zero, I’m afraid,’ DC Downie reported.

‘Nothing?’ Rab asked.

‘Absolutely nothing. Not so much as a call to complain about a car alarm going off.’

‘Ach well, worth a try. Thanks, Annabel.’

‘Any time, Dad.’

Rab gave Jasmine a warm wee smile, both proud and conspiratorial. It was an invitation for her to share a moment recognising the special bond between father and daughter. Rab having just tried to do her a favour, Jasmine considered it polite to fake it.

‘How accurate is STORM?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how far back?’

‘Last twenty years, everything is logged and backed up. If you gave a witness statement, gave your details to an officer after a wee car prang, it’s there. Before that, it’s a bit more sketchy, variable from force to force depending on what records they kept and what they got around to computerising.’

‘Twenty years, though. How many people go that long without paying any tax and having any recorded contact with the police?’

‘Well, it matches two kinds of profile,’ Rab suggested. ‘One being the extremely rich.’

‘And what’s the other?’

‘The extremely dead.’

Upon reflection, the possibilities weren’t quite as stark as Rab had painted them.

Jasmine considered that Tessa Garrion could have got married a few years down the line and felt sufficiently estranged from her sister by that time as to feel no need to inform her. If she took her husband’s surname she wouldn’t appear on the STORM system under her maiden name. In fact, she could have got married in July 1981 and not bothered telling anyone, because the two sisters might not have been on quite such neutral terms as Alice Petrie was making out.

She might also have gone overseas, though Jasmine wasn’t sure whether that would have been noted on her tax records. If she was domiciled elsewhere she wouldn’t be eligible to pay tax, but if she hadn’t been earning anything anyway, maybe that aspect of her status wouldn’t be updated.

The one thing Jasmine was still intrigued by, however, was the seemingly abrupt end to Tessa’s theatrical career. Did she get dropped? Depressingly plausible, but surely she wouldn’t give up just like that. Working in a shoe shop was also a plausible stop-gap, something she’d do to pay the bills while she was waiting for a part to come up elsewhere. The name Glass Shoe Company rang a bell, but Jasmine couldn’t place why. As far as she could think, there was no such shop in Glasgow, but it sounded familiar nonetheless. It had slightly uncomfortable subconscious associations too: something out of reach, unattainable, perhaps prohibitively expensive. She was talking the eighties, so maybe it was a now-defunct chain that had been around when she was a little girl or even before: somewhere her mum talked about but couldn’t afford.

First thing the next morning, Jasmine got busy chasing up her inquiries, finding that the two-day gap had been long enough to yield results, though she could hardly call them fruitful. She was informed that Tessa Garrion had not received any kind of welfare payments in thirty years: no unemployment claims, no child benefit, no disability allowance, nothing.

A further call to Polly established that neither Tessa nor any husband had claimed or transferred a married person’s allowance, and there was nothing in her records to indicate that she had left the country either.

The investigation was starting to take on a familiar feel. Tessa
wouldn’t be the first subject who turned out to have died whole decades before the client tried to re-establish contact, but she would certainly be the youngest, a tragedy Jasmine was feeling more acutely given the ways Tessa’s life had echoed both her own and, to a greater extent, her mother’s.

Jasmine felt a sense of duty-bound resignation as she reluctantly called Archie Cairnduff, her contact at New Register House in Edinburgh. This would put a lid on the whole thing, after which it would be a matter of finding out the location of the cemetery and as much information as could be gleaned about what Tessa had done with her brief life in the few years since her mother’s funeral.

As she dialled the General Register Office, Jasmine realised she was assuming Mrs Petrie hadn’t done so herself. She certainly didn’t mention it, only remarking her presumption that someone would have got in touch if Tessa had died. It was weird how many clients neglected to do this. Several of Jasmine’s investigations had been resolved through a simple inquiry to the GRO, Archie calling back in a day or so with the missing subject’s date and place of death. At first Jasmine wondered whether the clients simply didn’t realise this was a line of inquiry freely open to themselves, but when she pointed it out they always preferred that she do it ‘as part of her investigations’, even though it would cost them money.

It took her a while to understand what they were really paying her for. They didn’t go to the Registrar themselves because they didn’t want to hear their fears confirmed, a fait accompli mouldering in a file for years, even decades. It was important to them to make some kind of effort – not to mention a small financial sacrifice – while the possibility still existed, a gesture of penitence and regret, perhaps, before ultimately making peace with their loss.

Upon the advice of Harry Deacon, the first couple of times she got in touch with the GRO she had gone to West Register Street in person. Harry said it was important that she strike up a rapport with somebody there, so that they could put a face to her name when she called up in future. ‘It’ll help you skip the queue now and again,’ he said.

On her first visit she had utterly failed to strike up anything beyond
the most functionary conversation with some bleakly humourless female apparatchik who looked like she hated her job. More happily, upon her return she got talking to Archie, who had worked for the GRO forever, had a thousand stories to tell and was delighted to have someone who wanted to hear them.

That morning he began by expounding upon the office’s address, telling her how West Register Street was the phrase neurologists got patients to repeat in order to check for symptoms of stroke

Jasmine was happy for him to procrastinate. She always felt a little sad when it was confirmed that a subject was deceased, but this was one she had really come to hope was alive. Eventually, though, they had to get down to business. Archie confirmed that the date and place of birth checked out, so that they could be sure there was indeed only one Tessa Garrion. There was, as anticipated, no record of her ever marrying or having any children.

‘She hasn’t troubled the scorers, as the cricket commentators like to say.’

‘Hasn’t? You mean she’s still alive?’

‘Well if she isn’t, then the Register’s Office knows nothing about it. Have you any evidence indicating otherwise?’

‘No. Just a complete absence of evidence of this woman having existed after summer 1981.’

It was when he spoke to the girl, Jasmine, that he realised with a hollow dread what would have to be done.

She wasn’t much to look at: freckle-faced, slight; one might even say scrawny, wearing a suit that didn’t make her look businesslike so much as resembling a school-leaver dressed up for her first job interview. She was softly spoken, far from strident in her manner; the girl’s body language under-confident, almost apologetic.

Yet he knew she had already uncovered the secrets of the Ramsay family’s disappearance. This was a worrying enough precedent, but far worse was the passion he recognised in her. She had trained as an actress. Her dead mother had been an actress. Now she was looking for an actress who had gone missing at around the same age as she was now; probably the same age her mother had been when she gave it up to raise the girl.

He could see it in her eyes: this was not a pay-packet to her, it was a quest. A crusade.

Everyone he loved, everything he was, everything he’d done, it would all be taken away. Everything he was working towards and everything he had ever achieved: all of his work would be erased from history. He would be remembered only as the monster who had killed that girl, one more squalid murderer rotting in jail.

The truth would destroy not only him. He could barely bring himself to imagine the pain and the shame that would rain down upon those he loved, those who relied upon him. What had any of them ever done to deserve this? Everything he had ever stood for would be burnt to ashes, all his family’s reputations tarnished by the flames. Each of their lives would be ruined.

There was no other path now, he knew. It was his duty as a husband, as a father.

She would have to die.

Catherine could seldom remember seeing so many police in one place without any civilians in the picture. Given the auspiciousness of her surroundings, it looked like a convention, one that would have riots on the streets if the tax-payers found out the polis were having a mass jolly at Cragruthes Castle. The lawns, the paths, the avenues and the woods were swarming with officers. She could imagine the groundskeeper and the head gardener considering a suicide pact at the prospect of the damage.

It was about as far removed from the standard crime scene as she had ever encountered. Some castles just looked like very grand houses, a turret, a flag and an ancient family name all that distinguished them from other large country properties near by. The larger ones, such as Stirling and Edinburgh, comprised groups of grey buildings atop hills and volcanoes, fortified compounds rather than remarkable individual structures. This place, however, was the full fairy tale, precisely what every little girl and boy thought a castle ought to look like.